One of the selling points of consoles is the secondhand market, and the physical games.
If digital only, then consoles have fewer differentiators to PCs, and PCs let you play online without a subscription.
It's not a given, but it's a plausible future that steam boxes outsell playstations, and that Sony loses its lucrative cut of game sales because people moved to PC since there was no differentiator for consoles other than extra hassle and costs compared to steam.
Suppose Anthropic trained only on data they paid to create, and not the internet or stolen textbooks.
It would still be extremely difficult to muster any sympathy for an organization whose MO is to go public not to honestly raise capital to fund growth and development, but rather to dishonestly leave someone else holding the bag, in some cases involuntarily as their retirement funds are passively invested.
And even supposing they were honest and didn't have an IPO, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to care about their misfortune, because "consolidating all thought-work into the hands of those few who can afford frontier models and datacenters and power plants" is also a special kind of misanthropy.
And even if that were not the case, they're filthy rich already, so who gives a shit if the Chinese companies prevent them from becoming quadrillionaires? :)
It already is our families. We don't have healthcare. We live in rentals that enrich others. We take rented scooters to work. We have no retirement funds or futures.
Live in slavery and be happy? Hold a sign no one reads? Own nothing? Feel no peace, have no medicine?
I don't condone it, but I understand it.
I believe there's still the possibility for us to fix things in peace, but I can see why others don't.
The US interferes in the rest of the world 24/7 with tariffs on allies and preemptive bombings and undeclared wars and kidnappings of heads of state, etc.
Would it be immoral to interfere, or would it be more immoral not to interfere and to let that situation continue?
I love the software look so much though! I never did like the blurring of textures :)
They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version
What about every other system where we rely on parents to parent?
Kids can turn apple juice into wine in their closet
they can drive their bicycle to a drug dealer
they can rub a butter knife against the sidewalk until it's pointy
Do we need govt AI cameras in kids closets and on their bicycles? How do we verify they're cycling somewhere safe? How do we make sure they're not getting shitfaced on bootleg hooch they made with bakers yeast and a latex glove?
I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever.
My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway.
I think I have a chance.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch.
Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail.
Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.
They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.
Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.*
*Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint